Organizations may want to be agile so they may seize opportunities, respond to threats, and generally self-improve. The ability to adapt behavior for a current context is a fundamental optimization and survival strategy. Organizations that fail to evolve with their environment are not sustainable over time.
Advances in technology (e.g. The Web, The Cloud, and now the Internet of Things) have been transforming the environment for modern organizations. A radical reduction in the cost and latency of global collaboration is enabling new business models (e.g. Netflix; Uber; Airbnb; Skype; etc.) and disrupting incumbents. Organizations that cannot adapt to this increasingly distributed and dynamic environment risk displacement.
A challenge for many organizations is that their existing information, communication and automation systems, in and of themselves, do not support this new mode of operations. While there exist innumerable software languages and technologies that satisfy a wide variety of requirements, a significant challenge is how to flexibly and dynamically connect people, information, systems and devices for a new class of ‘smart’ processes.